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Upstarts
One of the important things to be done each time a firing battery moves is to locate it
precisely, so it will be possible to measure the distance and direction to any proposed target.
Under most circumstances, this has to be done by a surveying party with optical instruments and
steel tape, etc., and we had a brilliant survey officer in Lt. Raymond Wright. But on these maps
all he had to do was look at the gun position and stick a pin into the map. "The number one
howitzer is right there," he would say.
Most of the secondary roads were narrow trails sunk so deep in the ground that you
couldn't see the tops of vehicles going by from the next field.
Not only were the hedgerows ideal physical barriers for the Germans to defend, but there
was a severe mental effect from fighting through that kind of terrain. It was no place for a man
with claustrophobia. It was like walking through a haunted house with secret passages and
hidden peepholes so that you can get only an occasional glimpse through a half-open door at the
next room, but you can always feel eyes looking at you from some unknown spot. And it was
haunted by burp-guns instead of goblins, by mortars instead of monsters, by snipers instead of
ghosts, by the wail of the nebelwerfer [German rocket launcher] instead of the scream of the
banshee.
German machine guns don't sound like American ones. American machine guns sound
like mechanical typewriters, but no typist has developed the speed of a German machine gun,
which makes an almost continuous sound. I thought they sounded like ripping cloth, but the term
"burp gun" gives the idea. And German small arms fire was almost all automatic. It grazed the
tops of the hedgerows, or seemed to, and made you duck down. When you ducked down, the
mortars started to search the backs of the hedgerows. It happened again and again, discouraging,
terrifying, and often fatal.
And the nebelwerfer! Never will I forget the first one I heard. It said,
"WOO!woo!WOO!woo!WOO!wool" all very fast so it sounded like a distant siren. Then it was
followed by six almost simultaneous explosions, scattered by several hundred yards. The sound
itself was terrifying; the fact that even the man who fired it couldn't predict very accurately
where it would fall was plenty disconcerting too.
But the weapon our infantry talked about most was the German 88mm gun. These guns
were mounted on the "Tiger" heavy tanks as well as on standard artillery carriages. A terrible
weapon, particularly against tanks and aircraft. They were especially devastating because the
shells flew through the air so fast that you did not hear them coming before they arrived.
However (1) they had a very flat trajectory (path of flight), so that they weren't very effective in
hilly country, where they had trouble clearing the crests of hills to hit targets on the other side,
and (2) the infantry tended to lump all German artillery fire together as "88s" even if it came
from 75 or 150mm howitzers or even heavy mortars. That gave them more credit than they
deserved.
Now, having set the scene and the mood, let me go on with the story.
On the first day I went to a field near the two firing batteries and as Headquarters Battery
came in piecemeal we set up a CP piecemeal. I remember the whole day as the day I cleaned my
pistol. It had been sealed up in an allegedly waterproof bag and stuffed back into my holster.
Something had happened, however, and about a gallon of English Channel had gotten into the
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